Simon Maxwell has recently released an incredible 145 (!) book on using Enfuse, and in particular LR/Enfuse, for real estate photography. I highly recommend it to all users of this plugin, whether they user it for real estate photography or for other subjects. Areas covered include:

I’ve just released a new application (via Arctic Whiteness) that will appeal to those of you that also do video work using Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Library Manager is a great utility for running housekeeping tasks on Final Cut Pro X libraries. It’ll immediately find all Spotlight-indexed libraries and display them in one window so that they can easily be sorted and searched. Libraries may be cleaned to recover gigabytes worth of space by quickly and safely removing render files, proxies and optimized media files (users can rest assured that we don’t remove the optimised media if we can’t find the corresponding original media files).

Another small but oh-so-very-useful feature is Open Alone which will open a library by itself in Final Cut Pro to avoid having to manually close all the other libraries first. Finally!

To celebrate the release of this product we’re offering the full version for a promotional price of just €4.99 (just under $6.00 for those outside of the Europe)!

A few users of LR/GMail have recently reported problems with the plugin no longer connecting to Google’s servers.

Fear not, I’ve been working like a madman to find a solution. The latest version of LR/GMail now uses an entirely new way of connecting to the server that should solve these issues, and a number of other ones too.

Now, you may be wondering why people would use a plugin to send emails rather than using the built-in support that’s been available since Lightroom 4. Well, LR/GMail provides a number of niceties you don’t otherwise get:

The plugin also accesses your contact list to provide auto-completion of your contacts as you add them to the To, Cc and Bcc fields.

The plugin stores information on which images have been sent via LR/GMail (so that you can filter them).

The plugin stores a list of recipients to whom each photos has been sent (accesssed from Lightroom’s metadata panel). This gives you tracabilty for future reference.

Following a slight reorganisation the Photographer’s Toolbox is now officially part of my software development company Arctic Whiteness.

This change will have no affect on existing or new users other than the fact that payments are now invoiced in Euros rather than UK Pounds, and you’ll be send to Arctic Whiteness’s PayPal page for payment processing.

We sometimes have comments from users who are unable to download the latest version of their plugins from within Lightroom. Often the download is very slow, other times it fails half way through. The problem principally affects users who are located out of Europe (where our server is located).

This distance-related problem also manifests itself when asking the Enfuse plugin to download our copy of the Enfuse binary application.

To solve these problems we’ve now experimenting with an infrastructure change that should provide you all with more reliable plugin updates. As we move forwards plugins will be stored on a global “Content Delivery Network” hosted by Amazon, which is a fancy way of saying that the files in question will be stored much closer to your physical location, and should thus be much quicker – and more reliable – to download.

Since this represents a major change for us we’ll be rolling out the changes slowly. We’re going to start with LR/Enfuse to ensure that all’s well, and new versions of our other plugins will be updated over time.

We’d love to hear from users of LR/Enfuse who had experienced these problems before to know if this solves the issue for them….